Landline phones: Endangered Species
Lori Borgman | Monday, November 17, 2008
Our three children are grown and not a single
one of them has a landline phone. They consider “home phones” pieces
of antiquity – like disco and eight-track tapes.
Which probably explains why the first question
so many parents ask when calling one of their children, is: “Where
are you?”
It used to be when you called someone you knew
where they were -- at home. That’s why they answered their phone,
because they were home. If they weren’t home, they didn’t answer.
It was a good system. You knew who was home and who wasn’t.
Now when you call someone, chances are the person
will not be home, but will answer the phone. Since
I like a mental picture of where the kid I am talking to is located,
I’ve fallen into a standard greeting of, “Hello, where are you?”
“At the grocery store. (Beep, beep goes the scanner.)
Can I call you back?”
“I’m at Home Depot loading lumber. (2x4s clunk
in the background.) Can I call you back?”
“We’re hiking a trail and just about to the summit.
(A bull moose bellows.) Can I call you back?”
“I’m in a restaurant. (Loud music, chattering
voices.) Can I call you back?”
I have never understood why people answer a phone
just to say hello and ask if they can call you back.
Of course, they can call me back. But they better
not count on me being home.
Wireless phones cut the leash that once tethered
us to home. The evolution of the phone has given us great freedom,
but it has also disrupted a valuable pipeline of parental information.
When the family phone was a big black box anchored
to the kitchen wall, a parent could answer the phone and discover
who was calling, what they wanted, who they wanted to talk to, whether
the caller was a male or female, their approximate age and whether
they sounded friendly, curt, hostile or polite.
That 10 seconds of voice contact provided fodder
for the Twenty Questions game that often followed the phone call.
For parents, it was the Golden Age of Surveillance.
With the arrival of multiple extension phones
scattered throughout a house, it was now possible for youth to “beat”
mom and dad to the phone, thereby shielding callers from probing
questions. Pity the parent with slow reflexes.
When phones went cordless, parents lost even more
means of intelligence gathering. A parent could no longer “do dishes”
in the kitchen and get the lowdown. The portable phone could move
to a bedroom, a closet, the basement, the roof or the crawl space.
A determined parent could get some information, but it was
awkward.
“Mom! Get out of the closet. There’s not room
for both of us!”
And then came the cell phone. Children armed with
their own phones are younger and younger and a lot of parents have
no idea who is calling, how often they call, what they sound like,
what they want, the nature of the message in the text or the picture
in the e-mail.
Parents setting young children up with cell phones
lose a lot of information in exchange for being able to call and
say, “Hello, where are you?”
You can ask that when they’re in their 20s. When
they are adolescents and teens, you need to know a whole lot more.
